Jameela in Charlotte, North Carolina, says her family refers to their television’s remote control as the clicker, but her friends insist on calling it the remote. These devices go by other names as well, including doofer, flicker, zapper, and...
Here’s an unparalleled misalignment in which the words in one pair are synonyms of the words in the other pair: organic chemistry and carbon dating. This is part of a complete episode.
Chris in Omaha, Nebraska, asks about the use of the adjective husky to describe the boys’ clothing section in a department store. This coded term refers to clothes made for heavier fellows. Husky was originally a positive term connoting the...
What’s an unexpected term for tollbooths? How about … Bill Gates? This is part of a complete episode.
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has devised another take-off puzzle, meaning that taking off the first letter of a word results in a second word. This time, the initial letter is the letter O. For example, if someone has unlatched the gate to the pigsty...
Janet in Montgomery, Alabama, reports that a day after she had surgery on her hand, the wound burst open, and a doctor noted that her wound dehisced. She’s used to hearing dehisce used in botany to mean the splitting of a plant structure to...